We are in full swing with spring in the Greenhouse!

During a very busy Easter period we had an equally busy time in our Greenhouse.  Throughout the Easter holidays we held the Spring Seed Giveaway, an activity suitable for all ages. The At-Bristol team created the seed sorter quiz to establish what seeds best suited our participants’ needs and gave away a packet of seeds to turn gardens or window boxes into an edible haven.

Visitors thoroughly enjoyed our novel planting activity – The Hanging Gardens of Bristol! – and Japanese Kokedama-inspired aerial gardens are now hanging throughout Bristol, allowing visitors to conduct their own growing experiments at home and to eat their mini harvest as reward! Once harvested, visitors are popping the spent gardens in their compost heap, thus celebrating the beautiful cycle of growth and decay.

Our summer season preparation is well underway! Keeping it super seasonal as always, we will be running two interactive activities in our greenhouse when we will be inviting visitors to examine the differences between seed coats with our Proscope microscope and sow a summer salad to take home. As well as feeding our visitors, we will be sowing Borage to feed our honeybees!

We also encourage our visitors to explore a few bee facts too! Do they know how long a honeybee’s tongue is, for example?

As well as our bee friendly activities, our ever popular Honey Factory exhibit with bespoke bee-autiful bee costumes, outside At-Bristol there is a HUGE buzz about bees!

At-Bristol recently hosted the Bristol Pollinator Summit and consequently we have now been able to agree the installation of a bee hive on our green roof (which will be planted with wild flowers)! This will enable us to bring live footage from a webcam within the bee hive onto the digital screens in our Greenhouse, showing what really goes on a working hive, thus further enhancing our visitors’ understanding of the significance of the honey bee in our long-term food chain.

Roll on summer!